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John Glenn’s $40 Camera Forced NASA to Rethink Space Missions
- aquir 4y agoWhat an amazing story!
- doubtfuluser 4y agoSo amazing! Today they would have mounted the grip in the other direction… it’s very difficult to make selfies with this grip…
- giraffe_lady 4y agommm p sure he literally took what we would now call selfies with it sorry to ruin that for u.
- caseysoftware 4y agoWasn't he the only human definitely not in any of the pictures?
- ben7799 4y agoHe was the only human period, Mercury was a single seat ride!
- estebank 4y agoWhat GP meant is that he was taking a picture of Earth, hence every living human but him was in the picture. That doesn't quite work for Mercury given the orbit, but certainly does for the pictures taken in the Apollo missions.
- dylan604 4y agoThe old adage of the only way to ensure you're not in the picture is to be the one taking the picture doesn't really work now. Now it seems to be reversed. The only way to be sure you are in the picture is to take a selfie
- syncsynchalt 4y agoDifficult but not impossible — I think there's a "selfie" halfway down the article. > "A photo of astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. aboard the “Friendship 7” Mercury spacecraft during the Mercury-Atlas 6 spaceflight." The grain and quality seem to match the external photos, so I think it's the same camera. John must have had enough media training to know not to spike the camera like we usually do for selfies, he's valiantly scanning the horizon instead.
- orev 4y agoThe article makes quite few statements as if $40 is just some cheap camera. $40 in 1962 is $395 today. Still much cheaper than some special custom NASA thing, but that amount buys you far more than a “cheap drugstore camera”.
- Aissen 4y ago$395 is cheaper than a spaceflight-designed flight-certified espresso coffee cup ($650): https://spaceware.co/products/flight-space-cup https://spaceware.co/products/flight-space-cup (you can find articles about this).
- klyrs 4y agoThe shape of that vessel makes me feel unreasonably angry. Which, isn't all that angry to be honest, but it manages to press that "don't f with my coffee" button somehow. I think I'd prefer a mylar bag with a sippy valve.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoI think an resin printed cup for $700 makes me an appropriate amount of angry. That it’s in a completely idiotic design is just to be expected at that point.
- Aissen 4y agoThis design allows you to smell the coffee, something the mylar bag wouldn't allow. It also uses capillarity to prevent liquid bubbles from escaping while you drink. See more: https://blogs.nasa.gov/ISS_Science_Blog/2015/05/01/space-station-espresso-cups-strong-coffee-yields-stronger-science/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/ISS_Science_Blog/2015/05/01/space-sta...
- klyrs 4y agoIf you gently squeeze on the mylar bag in space, the liquid will cling to the surface of the spout. I'm sure that the over-engineered design is great at what it does, but it's an unnecessary skeuomorphism.
- ginko 4y ago>All this camera hacking was done hastily just days before the mission and on a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy. That's a bit unkind. $40 in 1962 is would be about $400 adjusting for inflation and those Minolta fixed lens rangefinders were excellent cameras and pretty much state of the art consumer cameras, especially the auto-exposure. Of course it's no Nikon F or Hasselblad (those went to the moon later-on) but you could do a lot worse in 1962.
- adolph 4y agoJust adjusting for inflation is not charitable. A $400 commercially available camera today would be about $0.25 adjusting for NASA. If it were for military use it would be the equivalent of $0.10.
- Retric 4y agoHardly NASA has a long history of getting good value for money. Just look at their funding of SpaceX and how cheap many of their probes have been. The shuttle was something of a rare exception, but it was also infected by the DoD’s requirements. Cutting edge R&D is expensive, difficult, and prone to failure. Just look at all of say Google’s failed green energy etc initiatives.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoThe shuttle was amazing. Never has there been such a versatile space vehicle. It could repair satellites, act as a small space station and bring satellites back to Earth. Hubble wouldn't be a thing with out it. All the other solutions currently are just kind of space buses (for equipment and people). There are different estimates for the shuttle launch costs -- between $500m - $1.5b. However for LEO there couldn't be anything more useful. The SLS launch costs run between $2b - $4b. It hasn't done anything useful so far...
- t344344 4y agoRight, unless it breaks and Americans have to launch from Kazakhstan :) There were two spy satellites with the same mirror diameter as Hubble. Launched by normal rockets! Without spending money on shuttle, US could launch new Hubble every 5 years or so! > Both NRO space telescopes have a main mirror nearly 8 feet wide (2.4 meters), rivaling the Hubble Space Telescope, https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-nasa.html https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...
- FearNotDaniel 4y agoI mean, it's a cool story and an awesome hack. Perfect HN distraction when I have better things to be getting on with so thanks danboarder for posting. It just slightly irks me that the article refers to it as a $40 camera so many times (14, in fact). I would imagine if you factor in several days' work by a Nasa engineering team the actual cost would rise slightly higher.
- clucas 4y agoFor those interested in the "automatic exposure" mechanism mentioned in the article, Technology Connections did a great video on it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwm_Dya0PFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwm_Dya0PFQ
- iancmceachern 4y agoLove this channel
- adolph 4y agoThank you for linking to that. The default of vertical orientation as a result of "half frame" exposures meant that device was about 50 years ahead of its time
- dehrmann 4y ago> They couldn’t just send people up into space and not capture the magic and beauty of it all. Hence "pics or it didn't happen"
- Grimburger 4y agoSo while everyone in the comments section is amazing us all with how inflation works, what's the cost of camera today on Perseverance? I'm having a rough time searching for costs on google and official pages, guess it's not a word that they like to put in PR pieces. There's 23 cameras onboard and it's not easy to work out what a single one cost. Edit: this is a great paper on the devices themselves https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9
- mturmon 4y agoThanks for linking Justin's paper, he has been the lead of the engineering camera system for Perseverance and, IIRC, for Curiosity before that (https://mastcamz.asu.edu/team/justin-maki/ https://mastcamz.asu.edu/team/justin-maki/) That paper is largely about the engineering cameras (for localizing obstacles, path planning, EDL diagnostics, etc.) -- as opposed to the science cameras (see paper Table 1) which would often be even more exotic from a hardware POV (e.g., spectral sensitivity and photometric calibration). The table links the following articles on science cameras, for example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00755-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00755-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-021-00812-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-021-00812-z I guess the cost of the hardware might be of some interest, but as you can guess from a look through these papers, it's the supporting engineering (e.g., calibration and I&T) that dominates the system cost.
- RobotToaster 4y ago>The sensor has 1600 × 1200 photoactive pixels I kind of expected something more than 2mp.
- EricE 4y agomore pixels mean the smaller each sensor for each pixel is and the less light each sensor for a said pixel can gather. Quantity does not always equate quality, especially in photography.
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- yawpitch 4y agoI love what they’ve done here to get they grip to attach, using just the cold show and what looks like a pin rivet and quite possibly some epoxy. The thumb actuator to depress a custom cable release extension is gorgeous! Now I want to make a replica.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago> During his three-orbit mission that lasted 4 hours and 55 minutes, John Glenn took the first human-captured colored still photographs of the Earth using this camera. Weird: in these photos the Earth's horizon looks rounded, rather than flat
- dylan604 4y agoI'm really confused by what you're saying. Clearly, you're talking about the lens distortion that hasn't been flattened yet, right? You're not insinuating the preposterous lies that the Earth is round are you? /s
- unsupp0rted 4y agoEvidently not only did they fake the blue marble photos, they also faked John Glenn’s drugstore camera shots
- em-bee 4y agothey used a fisheye lens to fit the whole width of the earth in obviously
- stevetron 4y agoCan one of these pistol grip devices be made using a 3-d printer?
- stevetron 4y agoCan one of these pistol-grip devices be made with a 3-d printer?
- bbstats 4y agoClickbait headline
- ben7799 4y agoNot going to say anything about the inflation figures. But the general tone of Petapixel is a perfect example of photography media still not getting it with the constant tone of "cheap things are toys" and fancy things are "serious tools". Nothing used to take the photos in space taken handheld can be a toy by definition, hindsight is 20/20 and yet they still make this remark. It's like no matter what happens people who write about photography can't figure out it's what you do with a camera that makes it a tool, not how much money you spend. Most of the people playing with toys are buying the expensive toys most of the time, but realistically there is no correlation between buying luxury camera gear and making serious photos.
- estebank 4y agoThere are two axes for types of people in photography: technicians and artists. Some go all in on the technical aspect of photography, obsessing over numbers, features and functionality. Others see photographic equipment as a tool for art, they don't care about what they have in their hands, as long as it is in their hands when they need it to. All the best photographers you might have heard of fall on the quadrant of "competent enough to understand the mechanics of photography but cares more about getting the shot". You can use camera equipment from the 60s and still take amazing, beautiful, evocative pictures. Even an out of focus, blurry, improperly exposed picture can be amazing. The "problem" is that the technical features of these tiny, amazing machines can be quantified and argued over ad nauseam. Does it matter if a lens has worse fall off than another? If the chromatic aberration is high? What about the pinchushion distortion? If you are gonna print the picture in a fashion magazine, yes. Does it matter if your shutter speed is 2000 instead of 4000? Does it matter if your lens is f/1.2 instead of f/1.8? If you're a wildlife or sports photographer, maybe. But if you have a camera on you, that's good enough, and you have the basic understanding of photography, you can capture an event that would otherwise be lost to time. Cameras in cellphones have destroyed the market for point and shoot cameras, but brought the advent of completely popularizing photography at a scale that could never have been believed before. Of course this is no different to cars, or computers, or bikes, or...
- avg_dev 4y ago
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- mongol 4y ago> Photography was the last thing on NASA’s mind This is the most surprising. Why was it so?
- krab 4y agoMaybe engineering vs PR? Rarely people are good at both.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI'm as surprised as you are. But the more I think about it, the more I can see how this could happen. It's kind of a hindsight thing given we know how the space program played out. But at that time, the entire mindset might have been, "we just need to get to space and not kill our pilot."
- gist 4y ago> This is the most surprising. Why was it so? How about 'let's get him back alive'. If that had not happened there quite likely would have been no program or a big delay in the program. The writer (as is typical looks at upside not downside of attention to certain details) is predictably glib with that as if 'geez why wouldn't they thought pictures were important!'
- themadturk 4y agoIt was near-mutiny by the astronaut corps at the time (all seven of them!) that made NASA bend enough to put a window or two in the capsule (which name the astronauts also hated, apparently, preferring the term "spacecraft"). NASA was woefully unaware of exactly what people could do in outer space, since they'd never sent a human up for more than a few minutes. They wanted to get people up and back down safely, to prove to the Russkies we were as good as they were. They simply weren't thinking about things like taking pictures. The astronauts, in contrast, were hotshots (even staid, conservative John Glenn). They spent their lives pushing the envelope, and going round and round in a highly automated tin can was less than they imagined doing. John Glenn taking a camera along for the ride was probably the tamest thing he thought he could get away with.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
- Waterluvian 4y agoThis touches so closely on a recent anecdote that I must share. The FIRST Robotics team I mentor just finished their season this past weekend. Something they did last-minute was add a GoPro to their grabber because they wanted to see some neat footage of it working, and maybe use it to improve the design or fix issues. Then one of the students had the idea to just put it in real-time mode and watch it live from their phone. Which instantly became an invaluable tool for controlling the arm effectively. They couldn't live without it after that. I think it was against rules to have a wireless device, so they took the idea and applied it to a USB camera that fed to a video output on the drive computer. I'm sure other teams already came up with this, but I was just so impressed to see that organic process happen with a bunch of 10th and 11th graders. They learned a practical example of all the buzzwordy things like "think outside the box" and "no idea is a bad idea" and "don't engineer everything, sometimes just throw ideas and see what sticks." I'm just so proud of them.
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- monetus 4y agoThanks for sharing - That is a warm and fuzzy story. It is nice to hear people have access at that age; I certainly didn't.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y agoThat is a really lovely story; I'm glad you shared it. I like these glimpses of the true joy and fun that can be had with the craft of engineering. Amidst the relentless barrage of bureaucracy that defines most modern SWE jobs, it's nice to know that there's still some good, pure engineering out there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI actually feel jealous that the students get an engineering problem like this. By only having about 8 weeks from when the challenge is announced, they're forced to cut through bureaucracy. There is no Agile and project planning. There's just round-table discussions on what to design, a bit of CAD work to feel it all out, and then weeks of prototype, build, test, loop. It was so darn lean.
- jarofgreen 4y agoIf you like this check out https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/443162/apollo-remastered-by-saunders-andy/9780241508695 https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/443162/apollo-remastered-by-... > In a frozen vault in Houston sits the original NASA photographic film of the Apollo missions. For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals. > Now we can view them as never before. Expert image restorer Andy Saunders has taken newly available digital scans and, applying pain-staking care and cutting-edge enhancement techniques, he has created the highest quality Apollo photographs ever produced. Never-before-seen spacewalks and crystal-clear portraits of astronauts in their spacecraft, along with startling new visions of the Earth and the Moon, offer astounding new insight into one of our greatest endeavours. I saw the exhibition in Glasgow, was good!
- gist 4y agoHate generally the 'if not for' type stories (usually by writers about certain inventors or some technology) . They would have figured out even if this hadn't happened that photography made sense to do. Also in addition to what others have said about $40 and today's cost the modifications and time for that were not factored into the actual value of the camera.
- antoineMoPa 4y agoNice story, but I still don't see how missions were re-thought.
- hipsterstal1n 4y agoThis is interesting and hits close to home. My dad and I are collectors of flown cameras from NASA missions. We have a few early digital cameras that flew on Shuttle missions in the very early 90's and they were modified similarly (minus the pistol grip). They were essentially film camera bodies with extra modules attached that had the digital components. We also have the extra large film magazines that were used, etc.
- jacquesm 4y agoInteresting! I relayed the output of the camera on the arm for one launch and a whole bunch of other footage from another.
- thechao 4y agoThere were a lot of avid Shuttle photographers. When the astronauts landed they'd develop the film and mount them to a cheap matte-off-white cardboard, sign them, and they'd go out to the various centers. When NASA JSC decided to "upgrade" to Discovery Center & boot the public out, they also threw away thousands of these photos. A friend's dad had taken some photos between spacewalks to repair the Hubble (STS-61?); I picked up some of these photos, and I really love them!
- causality0 4y agoon a camera that was essentially a $40 point-and-shoot toy. Is the author intentionally trying to mislead us or is he a fool? With inflation that camera cost $400. It was not a "point and shoot toy".
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- kepler1 4y agoIf I were being snarky I could say that this makes one reminisce of days when the engineering was so important and everyone was so focused on it that there was not even time to think of the publicity and marketing of what they were about to do. Versus now, where it sometimes seems that you prepare the product launch marketing materials even before the product. But of course, even NASA soon had those kinds of considerations to worry about as well, even in the 60s/70s.
- pgreenwood 4y agoSome credit should go to Wally Schirra, who was a photography enthusiast, and took his 70mm Hasselblad on the third Mercury flight. Nasa ended up using modded Hasselblads right through the Apollo missions (and after). https://www.npr.org/2019/07/13/735314929/the-camera-that-went-to-the-moon-and-changed-how-we-see-it https://www.npr.org/2019/07/13/735314929/the-camera-that-wen...
- glaucon 4y agoI'm interested to know what type of film was used ? I don't mean the brand but was it transparency or print ? I mean I assume transparency but given the article's suggestion, perhaps contrived, of the whole thing being outside of normal NASA structures it's possible it was print ?
- pgreenwood 4y agoSlide film as far as I know. Details of each camera, lens, and film (as well as original scans) for each mission here : https://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/ https://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/
- sowbug 4y agoWhy can't more articles be like this? The headline was a one-sentence summary of the full article. It took a couple minutes to read. It was full of detail. I feel happier than I was five minutes ago.